Incest Is Never/Always Covert

A collection of essays on incest as a family system, identifying incest before / without physical sexual assault, covert vs overt incest, surviving complex trauma, the role of humiliation in child sexual abuse, and the role of maternal neglect in patriarchal incest families. This zine is a contribution to our collective reckoning with, and knowledge building about, intrafamilial sexual abuse. It views child sexual abuse and sexual abuse within the family as explicitly political issues, not just issues of “personal healing.” It is for survivors and everyone who wants to become more responsible in actively working to abolish incest. “You will have to write the story many times. Each time you write the story it changes. The unspeakable becomes speakable and the unknowable becomes known. The little details you kept, incomprehensible, start to take on the shape of comprehension. The bread crumbs you left yourself, a map of metaphor, a song lyric scrawled in a journal, an arrow pointing this way. You’ll start to remember, not the events themselves but the meaning of them. You’ll start to know what you couldn’t know at the time.”